One Year On: Our First Year as The Billy Pilgrim Traveling Library

Logically, I understand why a year feels shorter with each successive year you experience. As an example, if I had started running a bookmobile when I was four years old (you know, as an example), the first year of bookmobiling would have been 1/5 of my life, which is a lot more than 1/28 of one’s life.

All in the name of literacy and entertainment, of information and culture.

We couldn’t have done any of this without such a welcoming and inviting community. We asked our members and social media followers whether they’d like to contribute a quote to include in this post, and received several humbling responses. “I’m so in awe of this sweet couple and the BPTL,” one read. “Their dedication and devotion to reading materials, their efforts and kindness of giving the gift of reading to many, renews my faith in all things Good. May the Beauty of Books live long and long travel with Chris and Kelly.” One of our regulars wrote, “The Billy Pilgrim Traveling Library has provided Houston with an indispensable model of how libraries can operate. All my life I have had my library experience come up short because of late fees! Thank you both for your passion and consistency in providing great books, movies, and tunes for cheap. Thank you and keep up the great work!” A third contributor “remember[s] buying some awesome Neil Young and Nick Drake CDs from [our] killer used CD collection.” It’s nice to know that we’ve had such a positive impact on the lives of other members of our community, and that other folks think that we have a killer CD collection.

So yeah, it’s been a good year, if an impossibly fast one.

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What’s in store for year two of the BPTL? Well, that’s all still taking shape.

We hope to forge new partnerships with more local businesses and locations throughout the city, inner and outer loop. We’ve already planned upcoming stops at Mangum Food Park and Watershed Market, for instance. We’d like to partner with other libraries, schools, artists and the like to repurpose our truck towards others’ goals, like we did with the Ector County Library. We’d like to put more books and CDs and DVDs in more people’s hands, to see return customers more often, and to generally increase our outreach – to host more programs and to be open more hours, and more days.

I can happily report that the good folks at Houston Makerspace are going to help make that happen.

Houston Makerspace is in the process of building out a warehouse in EaDo and installing various shops and workspaces that makers will be able to utilize for years to come. But somewhere in that space will be a publicly accessible library that will in due time serve as a home branch for the BPTL.

We’ll still regularly make stops in the bookmobile, of course. All said and done, we’ll try to be open to the public between 5 and 7 days a week. Having a library branch at HMS will give us a stationary space where the public knows to find us, a wider berth of hours to visit us, a home for the (not quite literal) ton of donated books and CDs that aren’t currently on the truck, and an opportunity to expand our services to include internship/capstone/volunteer opportunities, classes, book clubs, movie nights, author readings, and other programming that’d be difficult to hold inside of a bookmobile. And it’ll give us a chance to take a weekend off once in a while without feeling guilty that our members aren’t getting their money’s worth.

It’s definitely a work in progress, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get there, but we’re excited to see what year two has in store for us. We hope that you are as well.